Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sunday September 04, 2005 @01:36AM
from the good-guys-always-finish-last dept.

logan5 writes "SomethingAwful's forum denizens, on the call of site admin Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, raised over $20,000 dollars to be donated to the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. This was done via a PayPal donation link, and PayPal has now frozen the account on a twofold basis: one, that there have been reports of "suspicious behavior" from the "buyers," and two, that no shipping records have been provided for the donations." Since so many users are asking for it, SomethingAwful has provided a link for those wishing to still make donations to the Red Cross in the meantime.

You hate dealing with them the more you have to deal with them. Sadly this is not the first case of paypal outrageousness. They will happily do what they want and often may take money, they do not follow any real guidelines and you are often left out in the cold without them helping you. Sadly there is not a whole lot one can do when you run into bad luck. Unfortunately it can be hard to transfer money with others, and so you are left forced to deal with paypal. For a whole bunch of bad stories just visit one of the many sites like http://www.paypalsucks.com/ [paypalsucks.com] .

Well, this is actually somewhat understandable (somewhat). What likely happened is that the restaurant authorized a payment of $x.xx and then when you added on the tip, it came out to a different value that was authorized. PayPal likely saw this as either an attempt to fraudulently overcharge the account, or they simply had a policy of only paying transactions as they were authorized.

This has actually become a problem for banks. It's really easy for unscrupulous merchants to add on charges after the fact, and most people really don't keep track of their receipts so they don't notice.

I've seen lots of places that have started requiring you to fill in the amount of the tip before the transaction is authorized. I assume this is because of stricter regulations by the payment processors.

I've seen lots of places that have started requiring you to fill in the amount of the tip before the transaction is authorized. I assume this is because of stricter regulations by the payment processors.

Personally, I'd prefer this. I've not had any problems so far, but who knows what an unscrupulous restaraunt employee might do, given the chance.

I pay tips with cash whenever possible, so there's no way for the management to track it.

I pay tips with cash whenever possible, so there's no way for the management to track it.

God YES. If you want the money to go to the staff who you're trying to reward with your tip, you give them cash, and do it quietly. If you just want to line their managers' pockets even further, go ahead and use your card.

See this [dol.gov] if you don't believe me. Federal minimum wage is about $5/hr, except for employees who receive tips, in which case the employer can cut the "direct" wage as low as two fucking dollars an hour. They have to actually pay them the $5/hour, of course, but by making $3 of each $5 come out of tips, they basically make sure that the employee isn't actually going to benefit at all from your generosity - unless you're an unusually high tipper, they're just going to get $5/hr whether you tip them or not.

The waiters / waitresses are often the only people to deal directly with the customers. Therefore, it would make sense to pay them generously. Better wages for the employees means happier employees and better service for the customers which directly translates into better business.

I'm not in the restaurant business so I might be missing something very important.. but if I ran a restaurant one of the most important points in my business plan would be to pay my waiters / waitresses more than minimum wage.. even though the law allows me to pay them less. I would have no trouble finding decent help... and my customers would be happier because my employees are happier.

I've worked in many restaraunts and I've never had a manager steal my tips, credit card or otherwise. I made quite a bit of money waiting tables even @ $2/hr + tips. I don't this this rate of pay is really an issue.
I don't understand how you belive waitstaff makes only $5/hr with tips? Are you using some sort of anecdotal information for this? A waiters tips are his tips. There is no offset with the hourly wage, nor in any place I know of or have worked in does management take most of your tips away and give you back $3/hr.
Waiters are not low wage earners. Yea the benefits are usually nonexistant and the job certainly isn't any dream vacation, but I certainly made more than $5/hr.

A friend of mine sold stuff on ebay. He had a perfect record, nobody complained.

One day, he went to his paypal account, and it was locked.

My friend did not worry, he did nothing wrong. So he sent an email to paypal asking for details. He got back something saying "his account was being reviewed". My friend asked when the funds would be released, and paypal did not respond.

6 weeks passed, and paypal kept his money frozen.

Finally, my friend went to get a lawyer, and had him send a letter to paypal. His funds were released the next week.

He sent another email and letter to paypal asking what caused the account to be frozen in the begenning. He got no response. To this day, he does not know why paypal did what they did.

It is nice to have a company to protect people. But the company should say why they take actions. If paypal believed my friend did something wrong, why not tell him, and ask for a response? Why keep everything secret, and keep the account frozen??

* Complexity of their buggy software and the inability to fix those bugs

* Automatic lockouts kicking in to prevent money laundering

Another one is that they seem to be real bone heads.PayPal is owned by Ebay and therefore the preferred payment agent - except anything reated to sex. One canot pay with PayPal on Ebay in that category!

I don't tip because society says I gotta. I tip when somebody deserves a tip. When somebody really puts forth an effort, they deserve a little something extra. But this tipping automatically, that shit's for the birds. As far as I'm concerned, they're just doin their job.Look, I ordered coffee. Now we've been here a long fuckin time, and she's only filled my cup three times. When I order coffee, I want it filled six times.

These ladies aren't starvin to death. They make minimum wage. When I worked for mini

shut down accounts that SEEM to be scamming people, and then, upon futrther investigation, decide "this one isnt a scam, we will re-open it"

That might actually work, if they were willing to do the whole "further investigation" part. They firmly refuse to do anything. Perhaps they could actually try contacting a couple random buyers to verify their payments, and compare buyers' ip addresses to the ones they registered with. That'd tell them in 5 minutes whether the seller is scamming or if those are real donations.

Yes, but using silly excuses such as 'shipping numbers' to do it, when you clearly said you were taking donations shouldn't be the way to do it. Also, locking the account is unnecessary if that would be done. If they wanted to check the account, they should do it when it's open to allow more donations to be recieved.
PayPal just handled the entire situation in a very sloppy, unprofessional manner.

It's true that there's a risk, but it had over $3k/hour pouring in, and they didn't freeze it till it hit 20k, and they say it's because he can't provide a shipping number?
Precautions are one thing, this is something else.

They've done this sort of thing before. Often. To big and small. And yet, they're still raking in the dough. A quick search for "paypal sucks" brings up a quarter million or so pissed-off ex-paypal users.

Yeah. After hearing all the stories about people who got screwed, who in their right mind would treat PayPal like a bank account? As soon as you receive the money, withdraw it to a real bank account. Then, if you're paranoid, transfer it to your savings account that PayPal doesn't know about.

While I haven't contributed to the fund in question, paypal's amazing ability to decide when and where to steal money for their own reasons is amazing. I really hope some attorney general takes them to task for this one.

this is fucking bullshit!
Paypal: Where the fuck is my $50 going now? What the fuck is this shit!?

Oh, and the article leaves out that we donated this $22,000 in about seven hours, and lowtax was giving people free shit for doing it out of his own pocket, which was the reason he wasn't just linking the red cross. SA is down from the hurricane (http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/ [slashdot.org]) so there was no option to use their own credit card system.

It's okay, we'll all go take pictures of their corporate HQ or something.

Seriously, though, this is bullshit. I was (am) honestly proud to be a member of a community that was raising over $3,000 PER HOUR to help the hurricane victims, and Paypal couldn't be arsed to spend 10 seconds looking into the issue instead of just shutting it down. They're notoriously hard to communicate with as well, so this is just going to put further delays on things.

Why did you use Paypal? Why didn't you find some other merchant service? Why didn't you tell the guy to do this? Seriously, you know what Paypal is like, yet you all chose to pay money to them willingly.

So? Over here in the UK, we *still* have Paypal alternatives, such as NOCHEX [nochex.com] and PPPay [pppay.com]. Are you seriously telling me there are no slightly smaller, less-evil alternatives to Paypal in the US?

How they have avoided serious investigation for so long eludes me. Any other individual who abused a trust and hend onto the property of another person with no reason and no explanation, regardless of the terms of their AUP (the likes of which grow more toothless with each passing year) would be incarcerated.Even if they did release the funds, their initial action and the profit they gained from collecting for charity - yes, their computer may not know but the person reviewing the file sure as hell ought t

they locked my personal account AND My relief account.
Got $4,000 in two days to give to a few members on the site who had their houses flooded out.
I've been working with Paypal. I took off notice about a percentage going to the redcross - and they want all my tax info.
I'd post the site but I dont want to see the site get./'ed

I ran a donation for the PearPC legal fund against Maui X-Stream (it was on slashdot)

I collected about $1k in a few days, and PayPal calls me up while I'm trying to sleep, and they're like: "Did you know that you have had a large amount of money going into your account?" I'm like "Yeah, last I checked it was exactly this balance..." "Are you done asking me stupid questions now?"

That's what I don't understand. Why aren't they legally considered a bank? They handle money transfers like a bank, there are PayPal credit cards.If they want to play at being a bank then they should have to follow the same rules as the rest.

Just when I thought PayPal might be worth doing business with, this. They must have a world class PR department over there -- "Hey guys. Everyone thinks we're evil." "Oh, I know, let's freeze the donations for the Katrina victims. Everyone will think we're great after that."

Absolutely amazing. I hope Google uses this as an opportunity to launch GMoney or whatever they're calling it.

It was done by computer. But what's weird is that with $22,000 at stake they couldn't even be bothered to double-check. I mean, I'd understand automated shutdowns of $50 accounts, but, they already made $520 off of these donations. Why not spend $10 of that to doublecheck before shutting it down!?

I loathe your wretched, vile, disgusting, bloated waste of a company with every last fibre of my body. You're a grotesque, swollen parasite whose existence hinges solely on the lack of competition.

Yes, definitely a little anger showing through.

Seriously, don't use PayPal for important stuff. I haven't read their terms lately (it's like, what, 30 pages long), but I wouldn't be surprised if they can shut him down because of his "offensive" web site, or because he used copyrighted screen shots on his page, or because he mocked and disparaged PayPal, or left the dash out of his zip+4 code, or pretty much anything else that they feel like.

I wonder if this is related to the PayPal emails I've been receiving recently regarding suspicious activity on my account. From what I understand, Paypal does not have various safeguards that can help keep fraud to a minimum, unlike banks which are required by law to have these protections applied to all their transactions. Unfortunately, there really isn't an easier method of money transfers on the web than PayPal.

Someone enterprising enough could probably come up with a good online payment system that isn't fraught with fraud. I could possibly not have to re-enable my account every other day when PayPal's automated fraud detection system finds something amiss with my account. I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Hopefully those poor people in New Orleans can get the money and supplies they need to rebuild. It's a sick tragedy what's going on down there. I've been through hurricanes before, but I've never seen anything as bad as this in a non-Third World country.

PayPal has my information already. They need me to verify my information to make sure that my account activity is actually my activity and not someone else trying to hack my account (this is what I believe the case to be).

(Back on topic) I heard Americare is a very good charity to donate to in times of disaster.

I have a question about these PayPal emails. I've been getting them too, but I don't HAVE a PayPal account. How can I give them my account information so they can straighten things out, when I don't HAVE an account?

I wonder if this is related to the PayPal emails I've been receiving recently regarding suspicious activity on my account.

Hook, line, sinker and a lifetime subscription to Field and Stream [antiphishing.org]. I was wondering what kind of gullible soul fell for those badly created phishing scams. Apparently, it's reformed ex-cons. Tell you what, roll back some of that reformation and take another look at those e-mail.

"I wonder if this is related to the PayPal emails I've been receiving recently regarding suspicious activity on my account..." "... I could possibly not have to re-enable my account every other day when PayPal's automated fraud detection system finds something amiss with my account..."

"Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well."

Apparently Jesus couldn't save you from an elementary phishing scam. Might want to call up the Big Guy and check on your coverage.

Because its not a virus, just some plain old-fashioned social engineering.

A good rule of thumb is never disclose personal information to a web page you follow through an email link. You always always navigate to the page manually (type in www.paypal.com), and if there aren't instructions on how to find the page manually, then its a phishing email.

Didn't a bunch of fake donation sites pop up after the tsunami last year? Paypal may be attempting to verify the authenticity of the cause, we don't want the donations to end up in the pockets of scammers. For the technicality of nothing sold, they could sell shirts with the money going to the relief effort, but I don't know how that will effect its status as a charitable donation for tax purposes.Or as you said, some scammers used the donate info to get his paypal account name and are going phishing for ac

I think this might be a good idea since Something Awful was hosted in New Orleans and their main servers are obviously not online at the moment, so that temporary site is probably going to be blown away soon.

I totally agree about Paypal being a horrible provider of payment services. They are more then glad to take your 3% of each transaction as their fee, yet their service is horrible.

I had issues with them a few times now, from transactions on eBay and other transactions as well, one of which was never resolved and that money is gone forever. Thankfully the amount was insignificant, but it was more the point of the matter I guess, in that Paypal was useless in helping me resolve things, and basically DID NOT CARE and their "Buyer Protection" crap, is 100% useless.

I understand they want to work on preventing fraud, yet they need to be more careful about things, and take a better look at the situation, before just automatically locking a user's account such as this, and then having those funds useless.

You CAN call them up, and after being tossed around a few times, FINALLY get an agent that can assist you, but that usually is not until you act really pissed off (most of the time you don't have to act, you get pissed off at them hanging up on you, giving you the run-around, and such...) and then you finally get helped.

I wonder if all of us Slashdot citizens would unite and write hate mail to Paypal, if that would help in getting them to finally change their ways, and FIX the customer service NIGHTMARE that they run...

BTW: when someone says "for one" after "I" he is typically implying that there are other people who he is referring to, and he is just one of them. So while it may be redundant in that it repeats the implicit singular noun, its implications run much deeper and the true meaning of the sentence would not be the same without the "for one" part.

Good job.
I cancelled my accounts with these scumbags as soon as I read about this ~12:30AM Eastern.
As a previous poster suggested, hopefully Google Wallet will turn out to be more than hype and bury these assholes.

While I can understand some system in place to reactively deal with potential scams, ESPECIALLY given such a huge disaster as the whole gulf coast... I agree that the way PayPal has implimented their automatic system is rather, well, awful.

SomethingAwful has a lot of (crazy) enemies - it's not surprising that they would get a lot of gadflies out there submitting complaints, even at the cost of relief money going to flood victims. And I agree - if there was any sign of a scam going on, someone should have called to verify the events, or had a better way of cutting the account than leaving everyone's money in limbo.

In the meantime, SomethingAwful really should join another site's charity link, and work to resolve this in a way that gets those funds ultimately to that place.

I urge anyone with links to the media to let them know about this, submit it to your local paper, and even to the nationals. Let your local radio know, write an email to paypal threatening to close your paypal account and never use them again, the more bad press the quicker it will get resolved and they'll be under scrutiny for a while.

My aunt is news director of our local AM station, sometimes gets picked up by the AP wire, has an incredibly twisted sense of humor, and frequently uses eBay. I'm definitely showing her this over coffee in the morning.

Something Awful is Somewhere Awful [somethingawful.com]
After the plug was pulled on the popular somethingawful.com [livejournal.com], Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka of SomeThingAwful.com, hoping to focus the community's efforts on raising money for the Red Cross, in exchange for SomethingAwful.com merchandise, found his fundraising drive cancelled, by PayPal.com, when they shut down his account and stole the $20,000 dollars the members had raised for Hurricane Katrina.
Everybody needs to see the complete insensitivity that PayPal has. They have no shame. They have taken money that was going to the Red Cross, used their policies against a fine internet community, and has stolen Hurricane Katrina fund money.
This cannot go unpunished.

The only way is to get some attention outside the geek circles... as soon as the general public starts hearing about ebay (remember, paypal is owned by ebay now) wrapping up Katrina donations in red tape, SA will see some customer service.

I think it time we give PayPal's parent company an idea of what we think of their subsidiary. I'm willing to bet that if anybody with enough seniority gets ahold of this and recognizes it for the ticking PR time-bomb it is things could be set right.

Whenever an account gets too big, they freeze it and pocket the money. They don't have to explain their reasons. They don't have to let you prove your innocence. They don't have to give anything back if you can prove it. And you agree not to sue them over it (probably not enforceable). It's all in their terms of service, and demonstrated in the thousands of horror stories you can find on the internet. I know people who have been hurt by them. I never have and never will trust PayPal with more money than I could afford to lose.

Of course no one seems to have thought about WHY paypal canceled the account. I mean, they're an "evil corporation" cause SA says so thus they must have done it for kicks.

If this was a real donation scam account and paypal left it open I'm sure half of the posters would be screaming at paypal for NOT closing down the account.

Maybe you should consider how many donation scams must have been setup by now. Also, you may wish to consider how unusual this method of donation is and that more likely than not it is used to scam people. Most websites simple have a giant link to Red Cross and tell people to donate, because it's easier and they don't lose 3% in fees. You know, the concept of all the money going to relief efforts and not corporate pockets. Of course it seems SA decided it needed credit or some such for the effort of its members. Also, Paypal really has no idea who SA is or how trustworthy they are so they can only look at the current actions which look mighty close to a scam site.

Of course no one seems to have thought about WHY paypal canceled the account. I mean, they're an "evil corporation" cause SA says so thus they must have done it for kicks.

Check out some of the other posts. I've heard terrible stories about Paypal screwing people over for years. With the number of stories I've heard (and the consistency) I think Paypal is a very poor company that seems to shut down accounts on a whim and rarely explain why. I'm sure they have a lot of problems with money laundering, etc, but there's just too many stories of innocent people getting burned by Paypal for there not to be something wrong with paypal itself. This isn't just an "evil corporation" story, it's a company with a long long track record of unscrupulous behaviour.

Lowtax was giving away SA merchandise randomly to people who donated. He has hundreds, if not thousands, of shirts/etc in his basement he's never sold, so he wanted addresses added to the donations so that he could ship, at his own cost, at least a bumper sticker or t-shirt to everyone donating.

I dont usually advocate this, but don't you think someone should SUE THE EVERLIVING SHIT out of paypal for pulling this crap.

Hundreds of people clicked "give money to hurrican e victims via lowtax" I dont care if I click "give money to potato farmers for space baby" paypal shouldn't have the ability of lock accounts. They have no right to touch that money.

Im sorry if I just blew a bunch of positive karma, this needed to be said, and with A VERY LOUD VOICE!

I actually donated through Amazon's link before I noticed that Something Awful was taking donations. A few hours later, I checked my GMail account and saw that my donation had been denied. Turned out I used an old CC# by mistake. No big deal, and now I could donate through SA and get some free merchandise, too!
But the SA page was showing that the account was closed. And now I'd like to donate, but I'd like to do it through SA. I want to do it this way because I'd like to inspire competition among net communities to see who can donate the most money. It's a great way to constructively use people's egotistical motivations, in my opinion.
Wouldn't it be awesome if SA, Slashdot, Genmay, Fark, and all the other popular internet communities all tried to outdo each other in contributions? I guarantee this kind of competition would inspire tremendous giving.

PayPal provides a service of transfering funds. PayPal is responsible for the money stored in their accounts. If someone starts accepting money for any purpose and PayPal deems it a suspicious activity it is in the interest of the account holders that PayPal investigate the situation.
In this case an account growing at the rate of $3500 per hour is suspicious. If the owner of the account decides to run with the money PayPal is the only one left responsible. All the payers have every right to sue PayPal for not investigating unusual activity.
Don't even get me started on PayPal charging fees for services rendered. They've already provided a fee-free method for donating to relief.
Full disclosure: I have been a SomethingAwful fan for quite some time and believe that they were going to do the right thing. That still doesn't make PayPal a bad guy for being cautious.

PayPal sure gets slammed a lot around here, but they are a business really inbetween a rock and a hard place. PayPal has hordes of people trying to scam them with stolen CC numbers, and I am also glad they err on the side of caution even if from time to time what they do is inconvienient.It doesn't help that when it comes to moeny, people get a lot more worked up at the drop of a hat.

Hopefully they sort out this issue soon and free up the money to go to where it's supposed to.

I finally got ahold of a Paypal customer support person this morning (when I called last night, their automated "screw off" system told me they were closed for the night). I explained everything to her and she asked me to fax in a bunch of junk like my driver's license, statement from my bank account, statement from my credit card account, and various other things. I guess I should be lucky they didn't ask for DNA and sperm samples as well.

I told them the only reason, and I repeat ONLY REASON I was using their service was to raise relief funds, and the representative made a comment along the lines of "well you can see how it's counter-productive to get this resolved when you're writing 'Paypal sucks' on your website." Gee lady, maybe the whole issue could've been resolved beforehand if your company actually gave a crap about their customers and made even the tiniest bit of effort to resolve things without immediately hitting the "off" switch like that one jerk from "Ghostbusters?" The representative herself was nice, and I don't have a problem with the people working there; I do, however, have a problem with their automated systems making arbitrary decisions without providing customers ANY time to rectify the situation without risking downtime / account closure. You don't run a business treating all your customers like criminals and making them prove they aren't.

I'll be faxing in that information right now, so the money you donated to the Paypal fund WILL get to the Red Cross, but it all depends on the speed of the world-famous Paypal Complaint Appeals Department or whatever the hell they're called.

On 9/4/05, Rokas Kirvelis norgin@gmail.com wrote:

Instead of writing a fucking essay about PayPal how about you FUCKING CONTACT CUSTOMER SUPPORT like it told you to do? I wouldn't be fucking surprised if you photoshopped those pics (because text is so hard to photoshop) and took the money. You're not even doing anything to get the money back.

Yeah, okay. Thanks again for the support, Internet.

Still no ETA on when the servers and SA will be up again. No idea when we'll be able to get the servers and move them to another hosting facility either. Running a small business is awesome because, not only are you in charge of making sure a bunch of people get service and employees get paid, but you're constantly responsible for everything and you can't stop worrying about what will happen. At least your standard 9-to-5 job lets you leave work at your office when your shift is over; a small business is a boulder you carry around on your shoulders every hour of every day. Some days the boulder crushes you, and this past week has been a series of those days.

While I do know that in many cases (and probably this one too) Paypal likes to be quite draconian, in this case I have to wonder if they didn't actually have a legitimate case against this particular account. After all, a friend of mine is also running a PayPal drive [writerscafe.net] and has accepted far MORE money (Over $35,000) into it than the SA account and has had no problems whatsoever with paypal. Of course not only does he publish the records of the donation money going to charity at the maximum rate that he can extract the money from the paypal account ($3,000/day), he has also filed large amounts of paperwork with both the charities and with paypal to stay above board with all of this. The last time that he did a donation drive, paypal even reimbursed 100% of the transaction and CC fees to him.

Unfortunately, paypal makes this kind of a payment avenue and "tip jar" type donation system so easy for people to set up that most forget that there are a lot of complicated requirements when you start accepting and spending large amounts of money like this for the purposes of charitable donation. There are tax implications surrounding the money and requirements surrounding the donations for the donor, for the intermediary, for paypal, and for the charity. If you don't abide by them properly you're going to get shut down.

I'm sure they are sincere, but the way SA operates kind of makes you think that they could easily have brought this on themselves -- going nuts about the Paypal freeze probably isn't the best thing to do to get it resolved either, but it's typical SA style. I hope for the sake of all the donors and the charities involved that at least for once the SA people act maturely in this dispute or else all that money will be sitting there for weeks while the SA forums go crazy with the typical threats of retaliation and the normal fare while nothing happens.

Follow up commentary:Looks like I was right. Lowtax completely went on a tyraid about it and as a result PayPal didn't want to work with him. The CSR even asked him why he would put up a whole article about how paypal sucks on the front page of his site and then expect them to help him. Paypal does suck in a lot of cases; Lowtax is correct in this case; Paypal ought to held to the same standards as banks and other financial institutions, etc. but as of right now they aren't a bank and when they have $30K of

It was routed through paypal because Lowtax wanted to give Something Awful merchandise to everyone that donated over 10 dollars.

This is far from the first fundraiser SA has run. They raised another 20k or so for body armor for soldiers in Iraq, and recently a bunch of SA goons raised over 6k in a few weeks and bought toys for sick children, which they delivered in person.

I understand your suspicion but come on, this is is SA, home of one of the most populated forums on the internet. We goons care.

You guys sound like good nerds, but I'm sorry, I still don't get it. Pay Pal fees are horrendous.

Look at it from the outside (my perspective.) The website is soliciting donations for the Red Cross. 7% of all those donations go down the drain -- all so that the webmaster can verify that the donation was actually made and give people "free merchendise"?

It's definitely not standard practice, and I'm sure not the way the Red Cross would want it done.

I'm getting 7% from what Pay Pal charges me for transactions with verified shipping to confirmed addresses for amounts between $10 and $20. Maybe he gets a better deal, I can't read the link.

In the end, it's of course everyone's right to waste money as they see fit. If people want to pay seven cents on the charity dollar to say "Something Awful Rules" then that's fine. It doesn't make it any less foolish in my mind, though.

Yes but you forget this is America we specialize ( i know) in profits. Humanity what the hell are you thinking humanity doesn't bring in the cash. Maybe if you would have gioven PayPal a cut you wouldn't be in this mess now.

The owner of Something Awful is a longtime customer of PayPal. This isn't some fly-by-night operation that just popped up. Five minutes of investigation on PayPal's part would have revealed that it's quite legit.

And why would you be glad that PayPal is hording the money generously donated towards hurricane victims?

The main reason he wanted to do it through paypal was to get shipping addresses, to send them free stuff for donating. Similiar principle to buying CD's via CDBaby, with the money going to the red cross.The difference is, SA's servers are offline in NO, so he couldn't do it with his own credit card facilities, but had to use paypal. Who promptly stole all the money, not just the 3.25% processing fee.

I'm no fan of SA btw, or it's fans, but I can at least give props to the attempt to drum up donations with fr

And, he needed to get people's shipping addresses to send them free stuff. I'm sure there was some desire for glory involved as well, but having 'the community' take credit is a motivation for members to assist. I think they would have raised more money this way, then by some other method.

Read the frickin article, you knee-jerk, cynical jackass.If someone donated through SA rather than directly to the red cross (which it doesn't take a genius to do) it's because they decided they'd rather do it that way, and in some cases maybe they wouldn't have donated at all otherwise. They might not have rational reasons, but having another way to give money to a good cause doesn't hurt, and the amount that had gone in was a testament to that fact.

Well, knowing Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka's past history, maybe PayPal has a perfectly valid reason to freeze his account. It wouldn't be a surprise if a large part, if not all of the money went into Richard's private account. Richard has a lot of experience misappropriating funds and pretty much just outright screwing his users.

Yes, raising fund for forces stationed in Iraq and for sick children are horrible deeds indeed.

Oh, and just for kicks, here's some basic information about the site: The forums, which

Your a fucking idiot. The people left behind didn't have money to rent a hotel, cars to drive themselves away, or the good health to just walk. Remember, New Orleans is one of the poorest towns in the poorest state in the United States of America. There are a LOT of fucking poor people, and there was NO evac plan, other than "drive yourselves out of the area." No busses, no choppers, nothing but "you're on your own."

Think it's so easy to evac on a tip of a hat? Ok. Put yourself in their shoes, the poor and elderly left behind -- first, get rid of your car keys and wallet. These people don't have cars to drive or spare cash to rent a motel, they're POOR. Second, twist your ankle. A good chunk of the people left behind were elderly and ill, so having a bum leg will be a pretty good stand in. Now, grab your entire family, as much of your property that you want to keep -- should be funny seeing you walking with a bum leg and your PC case strapped to your bag. Remember, it's a hurricane, anything you leave behind is gone. Now go walk for 48 hours straight, see how far you get.

Ok, done? Good. Now take a look around. Ask yourself "Did I just walk far enough to get the hell out of the way of a hurricane?" I'd wager you couldn't even make 50 miles. And remember, this was only a Category 1 hurricane until it hit the warm "global-warming doesn't exist!!!" gulf waters, where it balooned, rapidly.

As for the looting -- oh good, they stole a bunch of ruined TVs. You racist moron. You know why there's so many "black looters" down there? Because the media calls "white looting" "finding food". Oh, and the 60% black population might have something to do with it, too. Ya think?

They went 5 days without any federal relief, all so Bush could set up Photo Ops. Think it's easy to go 5 days without food or water? After day two you have to think to yourself "Ok, so the 7/11 has bottled water and bread, and it's already torn to shit because of the wind, fuck this, I'm going to grab some."

It's so fucking easy to sit back behind your computer monitor in some comfortable computer room on a cushy computer chair and blame the victims of this disaster and subsiquent leadership clusterfuck. But in reality these people were in desperate need of help from their city, state, and federal government and that help didn't arrive until it was 7 days too late.

Greyhound tickets work better if the buses are working -- both busses and planes pulled out of NO several days before the hurricane. This is a lot of why there were so many tourists stranded -- they simply didn't have any way to leave. (Many hotels then kicked them out in the streets for "liability reasons".)

Interestingly, not everyone knew how severe the hurricane was supposed to be. News travels slowly when you don't have a TV or net.

People stayed for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they had no choice/car. Interestingly, if you walk, the freeways (at least on one side, I'm not sure about the other) are one of the worst places to be, because they are flooded early and often.